Part 6 Practice — Gapped Text
The unlikely return of vinyl records
Vinyl records were supposed to have died in the 1980s. The arrival of the CD seemed to spell the end for what critics called an inconvenient, fragile, and inferior technology. (1) Sales of new record players climbed to levels not seen since the 1970s.
Why the reversal? Part of the answer is simple nostalgia: older buyers returning to a format they grew up with. (2) For many of them, vinyl is a deliberate act of listening.
There is also a tactile dimension that streaming cannot provide. The ritual of removing a record from its sleeve is, for many, inseparable from the music itself. (3) An album has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Options (one is extra):
A
But what surprised many observers was that the biggest group of new buyers was under thirty.
B
Yet by 2016, vinyl sales had been rising steadily for more than a decade.
C
It also imposes a certain discipline: you cannot easily shuffle or skip.
D
The sound quality argument has never been fully resolved.